Reflection on Pitch Competition and New Articles to Come

I spent the past few months competing in an accelerator program for start ups and took a break from writing articles. I will resume the articles on a weekly cadence, releasing on Fridays

I took a break from writing my Substack articles for a few months because I entered a pitch competition over at my business school. The competition was an accelerator program for start ups, and I entered with an idea in the senior care space to compete for a pool of 1.4M in funding with 24 other teams. The initial idea was central to the theme of my articles. Our model was to provide a matching service for seniors to live in empty rooms in a host family’s home. The host family benefits by making an impact on the senior’s wellbeing, and by gaining a monthly stipend for their empty room, which would have been unused otherwise. The senior gains a better set of social connections by living with the host family, which would directly improve their social and physical wellbeing. As we researched and built out the initial business model, we found that there are substantial barriers to making a living option such as this widely available. These barriers tended to be legal, and supply side constraints where it would be difficult to find people willing to host a senior for the monthly stipend they would be receiving.

We pivoted the model in the middle of the competition to address these barriers, but still focus on the social health of the seniors. We shifted focus to matching seniors together to become roommates, which can provide substantial cost savings to the seniors on rent and utilities of about $500 dollars a month on average. The seniors also gain a more social living arrangement by having a roommate there in the home with them. We would be able to provide the service to seniors at no charge to them because we would make money from the real estate commission coming from the landlord of the apartment they rent together. The team and I worked tirelessly to build out new research, a comprehensive business model, and pitch materials for the competition. We did not win funding for the idea. The competition was stiff. For instance, the winning team already had about 300k in funding, and intellectual property for a nano particle, which can store chemotherapy drugs, and directly target high lactate environments in tumor cells.

We did not win funding in this competition; however, I learned many valuable lessons. These include the necessity of traction, the power of belief, and to overcommunicate. I entered this competition with just an idea. Other companies in the competition had been going for awhile and had more traction than we did. These companies did much better. When I compete again, I will have something that has far more traction. It’s not enough to just have an idea, you need market proof or substantial progress to justify getting funding. It was arrogant of me to expect to just haphazardly throw together an idea and expect to beat people who were more committed and had more traction.

The leader of a team needs to have full belief in the idea. I struggled with this throughout the competition, and it had negative effects on the team. It’s difficult to convince people to spend their limited free time developing your vision if they don’t believe in the idea. The belief and passion start with the leader of any team or organization. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

While the leader of a team needs to have full belief in the idea, they also need to adequately communicate the vision to other people on the team. There were several times where I assumed that people on my team knew what I knew, and it caused issues. I was researching more and talking to more people. Looking back, I should have invested more effort in making sure the team was up to speed on different aspects and proof points of the pivot in our model.

Reflecting on this competition I see where I need to improve, and that I need to be willing to make the necessary sacrifices to bring something worthwhile to fruition. I will need to be fully commit and maintain belief in the idea. I will need to improve my communication skills to keep people motivated and up to date with the latest information on what we are doing and why we are doing it. I will need to keep my own arrogance and ego in check.

I am a firm believer that you can only change and grow as a person through action. You can sit and think all day about what you are going to do in the future, or how you want to be as a person, but if you are not taking action, nothing will come to fruition. My participation in this competition really reinforced this belief of mine. I haphazardly put together an idea in the fall, recruited a team, and pitched twice to an audience of investors. I had to do several things outside of my comfort zone. I gained a reality check in terms of the ways I am currently deficient as a leader. Overall, this experience caused me to learn and grow more as person than anything I have done in recent years.

Moving forward I will continue writing Substack articles on a weekly cadence. I am shifting the theme of the articles to reflect whatever topic I am interested in. These articles will focus on social psychology, economics, current policy issues, and entrepreneurship. I am motivated to write these articles to learn about new topics and hone my writing skills. I believe that writing is a direct reflection of a person’s critical thinking skills. The only way to improve at anything is practice, practice, and more practice. Stay tuned for more, I will be releasing articles once a week on Fridays.